There was something larger. He was drawn to architecture, perhaps like many in his trade, through a desire to reconcile in himself some left-and-right brain schism of art and technology. But in his job, he found his work limited almost entirely to the screen, working on increasingly abstract projects. In bikes, he found that mix he had missed, the precision of threading sizes melded with the beauty of frame geometry. “It’s like architecture, but it’s smaller and I can touch it and it’s done in an hour – as opposed to a building which take seven years, and then it gets cancelled.”
Nocella’s story is almost archetypal these days – witness the popularity of Matthew Crawford’s The Case for Working With Your Hands, in which the disaffected author quits his job at a think-tank to pursue his true passion, motorcycle repair, leaving behind the creeping passivity wrought by corporate teamwork where “the individual feels that, alone, he is without any effect”. (via Building a better bike in Brooklyn. – By Tom Vanderbilt – Slate Magazine)